Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Cool new word (well, new to me)

As a writer, I'm a collector of interesting phrases and words. I recently came across an awesome word, in William Gibson's book Spook Country.

The word is psychogeographically. As in, "We didn't travel far physically, but the neighborhood I found myself in was psychogeographically in another country."

As far as I can tell, it has to do with the atmosphere, the ambiance, the feeling of the place. It's about differentiating one area from another, not on the basis of physical geography or distance, but on the human response to an area. So, an affluent neighborhood might be physically close to a run-down part of town, but psychogeographically quite distant.

Not sure if I'll have a chance to actually use that word anywhere, but I think it's a cool concept...

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